The dev notes here will stay and will show the larger new features that are planned as well as a summary of already completed new features.

2. Upcoming Project: Database Restructure (10%)

The database supporting Xu-Fu's different categories and menus is very old and is not set up properly. It is very difficult to create features with it, like for example the possibilty to move strategies, or some of the other future projects here including rematch mass export or a new ready-check tool.

3. Upcoming Project: New Ready-Check Tool (0%)

The Legion Ready Checker was one of the most popular tools on Xu-Fu. The addition of user strategies and breeds made this tool non-functional. To bring this back, a new tool showing the list of ALL pets could be created, showing how often the pet appears in each fight, broken down by breed. This could automatically cross-check with the saved collection. In a second step, a selector or sliders could be used to apply the table only on specific battling sections.

4. Upcoming Project: New Pet Tables in Articles (0%)

Every category article (like "Legion world quests") has a table on it that shows the required pets. This table is not using the new alternatives system and is therefore outdated.
This project is to create a new table that picks the best strategy for each fight in the category, based on the same criteria as the alternatives tooltip (favourite, ratings, tags..) and lists those pets. This should also include required or missing breeds. The table will most likely have a longer loading time and should therefore be hidden behind a "Load Pet Table" button that dynamically loads the table only on request.
Suggestion by Remte: tooltip showing which battles the pet appears in, make this interactable and the list of fights clickable to the respective strategy page

5. Upcoming Project: Rematch Mass Export (0%)

One of the most requested features is to mass export strategies to Rematch. Rematch can already import multiple strategies at once, but XuFu currently has no such export feature. That is mostly due to the existance of alternatives. Until user strategies and favourites, the page had no way of knowing which strategy is the best for you. This new tool will make use of those features and give you options from which section you cant to export strategies from, and if only your favourites or also the top pick for you should be exported.

6. Upcoming Project: New Dungeon Tool (0%)

Due to Teroclaw-Hatchling changes, the hardmode guides for Wailing Critters and Deadmines have been removed. Also, because of the addition of user strategies, the Celestial Tournament Planner is not working anymore. A new tool should be created that can be applied to any of the dungeons and to find the optimal strategies based on user collection for non-healing dungeons.

7. Upcoming Project: Pet Cards (0%)

Xu-Fu already has a database of all available pets with their skills, stats and additional info. This could be used to replace wowhead tooltips with built-in Xu-Fu pet tooltips that show more details about each pet, reduce loading times and give additional value to the tooltips.
Additional idea with it: Capture source of pets more clearly. Where are pets coming from? Add more tags as well that go along with it: Premium (for pets like baby winston - not in the shop but was a bought pet technically). Seasonal => Only available during specific seasonal events.

9. Finished Projects

9.1 Project: Collection Comparison Tool (Finished April 10, 2020)

The tool can be used to easily compare two collections for missing/dupes/tradeable etc.

9.2 Project: News 2.0 (finished October 18, 2019)

The news section now supports different topics and different users posting news. It shows a quick overview and is more easily searchable. Articles can be edited with the article editor for news writers and each article opens up in a separate page showing the full view + comments.

9.3 Project: Article Editor (finished April 16, 2018)

The page hosts many different articles and supports localization into 9 languages. This editor makes it easy for other users to add, edit or translate articles.
It is fully integrated into the user system, UAC, and allows on-page editing.

9.4 Project: Battletable 2.0 (finished June 02, 2018)

The battle tables were the first thing created on Xu-Fu. They are mostly static and not up to the standards of the current page.
This project was to fully re-create them, to integrate the user system, user collections and to add many more features such as breeds, coordinates, new Rematch formatting, an automated substitute finder and the option to record your attempts to make the strategy more accurate through crowd intelligence.

The substitute finder uses this logic:
no requirements => all substitutes are fine, based on skills and family
only a breed => creator pet, only show the selected breed(s). For substitutes, ignore breeds
only a stat => use the stat to determine which creator pet breed is OK. and use the stat for substitutes and their breeds
breed and stats => for the creators pet, only show the breed he activated. for substitutes, use the stat to show them or not.

9.5 Project: Dynamic Alternatives (finished July 01, 2018)

There should not be a limit to the amount of alternatives saved for any given fight. They should not have a fixed order either. The order should be dynamic and follow a logic that could include user settings, if the pets are in your collection, strategy upvotes, favourites, amount of pageviews, records of successful attempts or other factors.
The interface should use AJAX to reduce loading times and give a clear preview of the pets used.

The order in which strategies are shown is determined by 4 factors. Each factor supercedes the next. From top to bottom:

1. Favourited by userIf you set a strategy as favourite, it will be shown on top always

2. Pets missing from collectionThe sorting will prioritize based on how many pets from the strategy you do not have in your saved collection:
No pets missing > one pet missing > two pets missing > three pets missing

3. Tags - optionalIn the user settings, you can set the order of importance for all tags. Preferred tags move the strategy up, unfavored tags move it down in priority.

4. Rating and FavouritesRatings and Favourites are calculated together into one single score. The calculation is:
- One favourite counts exactly the same as one 5* rating
- The stars are transformed into the numerical sequence -2, -1, 0, 1, 2
- The average is calculated and multiplied by a factor that is determined on the amount of votes+ratings:
1-10 ratings: Factor = 0.5
11-20 ratings: Factor = 0.8
20+ ratings: Factor = 1
This calculation makes sure that a single 5* vote on a strategy is not counted more important than an average of 4.8* from a large amount of voters, for example.
Likewise, a strategy that received many below average votes will be considered worse than one that received only a single 1* rating.

The first three factors only apply to registered users. If you are visiting without a user account, only factor 4 decides the sorting.

9.6 Project: User Strategies (finished August 01, 2018)

Users should be able to add and edit their own strategies. The editing options should be integrated into the Battletables without adding more pages. Most if not all options should be dynamic using AJAX to minimize page reloading.

love the site and want to submit my bug report. I am not sure where to post this bug report so this post might need to be moved or removed. Here is my problem: When I am looking at a strategy on my touch screen device, in Google Chrome for Android 80.0.3987.162 and click on the alternatives. A menu comes up, but if there are too many alternatives on the menu I cannot scroll down the list. If I try to scroll down it reacts to the first touch and immediately closes the menu even if I press directly on the scroll bar. It does the same thing even if I request the desktop site version in my browser.Very annoying because I cannot see all the alternatives. Thank you. (edited)

The sad but simple answer, though, is: There is no mobile version of the page. It was never designed to support mobile :/ I try to make tweaks here and there but lack the knowledge (and time) to make it really mobile friendly.
I'll log a bug ticket for me to look into the alternatives tab a bit more, maybe I can come up with a solution. Thanks for reporting it and sorry I don't have a better answer for you!

Some people also don't like to alt + tab if they only have one monitor. I know for me, half the time I don't remember what I was looking at when I move to a different screen. Imagine trying to do some of the strats on here, and alt-tabbing for each step.

I don't have to imagine; that's what I do when I'm checking a strat out. (I really should bring down my second monitor and find the adaptor and set it up again.) What I can't imagine is the awkwardness of trying to use a phone screen instead. But OK, if people do that, then they do, I guess.

when i'm not at home during the week (which is usually the case if not for the current quarantine stuff) and not always have access to a pc or tablet i'm sometimes forced to do strategy reworking on my phone... and that really isn't pleasant at all

Hi, are you aware of a bug that is effecting the site's Export Team feature? The error message below seems to be injecting itself into the export, also every line now includes a BR HTML tag in addition to newline markup tag.

Error messages:

This error message: "Use of undefined constant language - assumed 'language' (this will throw an Error in a future version of PHP) in /kunden/426045_85652/webseiten/Petguide/classes/ajax/bt_rmsteps.php on line 152

This error message: "Use of undefined constant language - assumed 'language' (this will throw an Error in a future version of PHP) in /kunden/426045_85652/webseiten/Petguide/classes/ajax/bt_rmsteps.php on line 179

For the pet dungeons, instead of just spitting out the optimal strategy for each encounter based on our pet list, make a dungeon optimal strategy list all at once? What I mean is I look up, let's say, Gnomeregon, and it tells me for optimal strategies to use the same pet in 5 fights. Maybe something where it starts at the last fight and works backwards, so your best pets are used for the last fight (let's say it's fight #10), then it goes back to fight 9 and looks for an optimal strategy that doesn't use the 3 pets you'll be using in the final fight unless you have 2+ of one of them. This way you don't get to fight 8 and it says to use Ikky, but all 3 are either dead or too wounded from fights 2, 4 and 5 to be used again.(edited)

That's definitely planned :) It's currenty listed as "Upcoming Project: New Dungeon Tool" and what you are suggesting is *exactly* what I'm planning to do ^^
Hope I'll be through this current database rework soon so I can jump on cooler stuff like this one.
Thanks for the suggestion! If you have any other ideas, always happy to hear them

I would suggest GitHub or GitLab for maintaining and developing this project. These 2 tools are no overkil for this "small project" as you called it in the beginning. Both offer free code versioning for private repositories, Issue Tracking and more. Personally I prefer GitLab as it has more features.

Hey ragath!
I know about both and what they do, but have never used them to work on a software product. I'm very much a novice in this field and in the creation of this page I made many mistakes that make it very hard to move it to a repository, mostly security details (hardcoded passwords yay!). The effort to make everything ready for such a move is probably quite high, and a big unknown to me. So it's part not wanting to invest the time and part not wanting people to see the code behind this page that keeps me from doing it ^^'

I'm a professional software developer and I work with GitHub everyday. So in case you are interested in learnig how to get to a "new Level" I could give you some tips. With private repositories your code is not public and not visible to others. In case of hard-coded passwords and stuff there are simple methods how to handle it, e.g. using .env files or simple array files. But I also understand that it's a bit of work to migrate this project to GitLab etc

I’d like to report a bug, hope this is the right place. A linked group of similar crabs, starting with Kelp Scuttler, does not have their abilities aligned. For example, if the Kelp Scuttler is listed with the skills 1 1 2, when you scroll through the rest of the group, they are all listed as skills 2 2 2, while they should be the same as the first one. You can see it in this strategy:

Wondering - now that they changed the way pet battles work, would it be doable to add the pet trainer names in brackets beside the quest name? Not everyone knows the WQ name if it isnt up, but the trainer name is easy to reference.

Not too soon: To avoid duplicates, any achievement-specific (Plushie, Family and as it was suggested The Longest Day) strategy could be automatically linked in the "global" encounter list (still redirecting to family section after clicking). To prevent clutter, they could be displayed only via user input to show more. If this is not worth it, just expand the duplicate warning to all sections of the page… though it could be problem when someone decides to apply a strat the other way i.e. from globals to specific ones :P

Implementing a mention feature like I've seen you talk about sounds fantastic.
Another thing I've thought would be great would be adding a "date posted" and/or "date updated" to strategy pages. That way if/when Blizzard nerfs and makes changes to battle pets again, we'll be able to see when the strategy was posted, and whether or not it's been updated since the changes Blizzard made, so we know to alert others in the comments about it or to just look into finding a more recent strategy.

Just found this page of upcoming projects. A lot of great stuff there. Just a couple requests.Under #10, you asked "Add a friend (what effects)" I would love to be able to add a friend and compare our pets, to see which ones they have that I still need. Also I would love a category on the pet lists that tells me how rare my pets are compared to the rest of the wow population, something like "Pet name = Ikky: Owned by 25% of other players"

Hey! Long time user here, love love love your work :)
Have seen few suggestions similar to mine, relating high XP battles leveling pet fights.
I was thinking of a list of fights for Pet battle week (bonus event) when you get that lovely +200% XP, focusing to those battles that give high XP.
So my idea was to have a list categorized by areas, where you can find those battles that give high XP, so most beneficial to do on the bonus week. It could be a pet leveling strat at the same time even on the weeks where the bonus XP isn't on.